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Considering that Pfizer is already responsibly including the message that Viagra does not stop HIV or other STDs in their bus shelter ads and on the package insert, which also stresses the need for safer sex, I suspect that the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is campaigning against the company in order to squeeze an educational grant out of them.
 
In light of the fact that a year-long effort by an NIH panel to determine if Viagra was driving up HIV rates found scant evidence to back up a claim by the San Francisco health department STD chief that it was fueling new infections, it may be time for AHF and the SF DPH director of STD control to end their jihad against the drug and Pfizer.

In fact, the NIH panel found that Viagra and similar drugs are doing much to help people with AIDS have fulfilling, and safe, sex lives, something AHF should keep in mind as it hopefully ends its unnecessary jihad on Pfizer, a jihad, by the way, that contributes significantly to demonizing and stigmatizing gay men living with AIDS.

Michael Petrelis



Oh and the suit seeks compensation for the increased caseload brought on by Viagra use...what a shocker (snicker). You gotta hand it to Weinstein, if he can’t get his tribute from Big Pharma in meds, he’ll pry it out of them in $.

But what I am truly grateful for is Weinstein’s generous and ongoing concern in ensuring that once an HIV infection is diagnosed, any and all patients must be made to see that any subsequent sexual activity is simply out of the question. Ensuring that end, henceforth any Gay male HIV patient requesting treatment from AHF will first be required to submit to penile amputation, accompanied by testicular castration, removal of the prostate, a colostomy and partial closure of the jaw to ensure that any and all orifices involved or employed in sexual gratification are safely rendered unuseable.

I’m assuming female patients will undergo similiar procedures to the oral and rectal cavities along with immediate radical hysterectomy with removal of the ovaries (to ensure the immediate commencement of menopause) and suturing of the labia to ensure that the vagina itself is rendered unuseable.

...As we all know—and as Michael, his Flying Monkeys, Jeff Klausner and Les Pappas are always happy to remind us—if we had only behaved ourselves, none of this would be necessary...

Peter M.



That’s what happens when you don’t have people covering beats any more, you get ignorant folks swallowing it whole. They fall into the trap of pharma bad, ASO good. And it ain’t always true.

Bob Roehr



Mike Weinstein of AIDS Healthcare Foundation approaches AIDS education by demonizing and stigmatizing people living with HIV in a slew of viscious attack ads that have become notorious in LA and other cities where his operatives run his charity. He has contracted with an Ad agency called Better World Advertising to push the idea that People with AIDS are grotesque and deformed monsters that must be avoided so one can be safe from contracting AIDS.

In reality most people with the AIDS virus don’t even know they are infected nor do they look as hideous as Weinstein portrays them in his adverts, so he even misses his own stated goals. He does not
appear very smart, does he?

Or perhaps it’s that he has another agenda. One that is unnervingly similar to the agenda of the far right: to deny and diminish rights, to Gay people as a mechanism for social control. This latest attack on Viagra hits particularly close to home so I am impelled to reply with some indignant anger.

Weinstein, I will not permit you to create an environment where my sex life can be taken away from me. This time you have bitten off more then you can chew. Both the Christian right and you, Weinstein, in some egomaniacal fantasy believe that you can enforce your idea of ’correct’ sexual behavior through political coercion and social manipulation. Both of you are dead wrong. Both of you are destined to fail in the most humiliating way. The Christian right has its closets full of embarrassing information that comes out at the most inopportune time, and I can’t help but feel the same fate will befall Weinstein.

Andrew Sullivan quoted Weinstein to the effect that ’the best way to end the AIDS epidemic is to see people get sick and die’. This is bad public and epidemiological policy. It’s irresponsible.

Outright crazed elements like Weinstein ought to be forced to resign from positions where they can do damage to public health policy.  Weinstein will implode by his own bizarre statements and behavior. If the AHF wants to avoid going down in flames with him, they better ’retire’ him and fast.

This tin-pot would-be dictator to the Gay community is universally reviled outside his little politburo of sycophants in control of the AHF. He has made a habit of using AIDS as a club to beat money out of the pharmaceutical companies to enrich the coffers of his operation, and he has succeeded in several instances with this sort of strong arm fund raising. Now I am not a great fan of Pharmaceutical companies, but I am less of a fan of vicious opportunists like Weinstein who are carrying out the policy of the Christian coalition in the gay community; to demonize and deny gay men basic human rights, in this case to an erection. 

It’s known that HIV medication affects sexual functioning. It’s known that anti-Gay social stigma causes depression, which affects sexual functioning, and indeed, meth use affects sexual functioning.

Many more Gay men’s sexual functioning is affected by HIV medication, HIV illnesses and by anti-Gay stigma than by meth use. Weinstein knows this but doesn’t care because he also knows that in the current sexually repressive climate he can get mileage and money by raising the demons of Gay men having sex and spreading AIDS. So Weinstein feels that his anti-Viagra campaign will create a perfect storm for his aggrandizement and enrichment. He will find that this perfect storm will engulf him in ways that has not anticipated.

When this goes to court and I hope Pfizer will have the backbone to stand up to Weinstein rather then pay him hush money to go away, much like Abbott did a couple of years ago, there will be a line of Gay people and AIDS activists ready to testify against him, myself included.

Al Benson, Real Prevention